Been debating a self proclaimed pro 2A progressive in the comment section of a Facebook post. He claims a push from Democrats to infringe on gun rights is a right wing talking point. I simply directed him to Joe Biden’s website where the plan to curtail gun rights is laid out. His response was that Obama had the same plan but nothing ever happens so we should not fear electing Democrats. I had to point out that it was Joe Biden’s “Crime Bill” in 1994 that banned the most popular semi automatic rifle legally owned by millions of Americans today.
I’m not a single issue Conservative so there isn’t much if anything in the Democrat platform that I agree with, but that’s another point to be made another time. What’s interesting to me is the amount of falsehoods and deception used by Democrats to promote “Gun safety”. That term alone is used to confuse a majority of the population that has no knowledge of guns and their benefits. The fact that it apparently confuses some that do own guns that would be regulated makes me question the integrity of Democrat gun owners.
So I broke down the statistics from the actual link used by the Biden plan. First, the title itself contains three lies in one sentence:
The Biden Plan to End Our Gun Violence Epidemic
Did you spot them? 1st lie: gun violence isn’t a thing. There is only violence. Remove all guns from the face of the Earth and the deaths from violence will not change as a result.
2nd lie: there isn’t an epidemic. I’ll cover this later when I get to the stats he is citing.
3rd lie: it won’t end. You can’t end violent deaths with any plan. Take all the legal guns, what’s left? Illegal guns. Who has illegal guns? The ones responsible for the current death rates, the violent criminals. Even if every point in this plan is put into law, and even more not outlined, Southside Chicago remains Southside Chicago.
On to the statistics. The plan claims 40,000 gun related deaths per year. It’s 39,773 but that isn’t discriminate. Right off the top we have to eliminate 23,854 suicides with a firearm, the largest cause of firearm deaths. Why? Because suicide isn’t a gun issue. It’s a mental health issue and is closer to an epidemic than “gun violence” even when you include suicides with guns. Half the suicides are committed by other means. Eliminate guns and severely depressed people will use the other means. Hey Joe! If 39,773 gun related deaths is an epidemic, what is 47,173 suicides?
The first thing that puzzled me when I clicked on the link to the 40,000 figure and was taken to The National Vital Statistics Report, is on the chart listing the top causes of death in 2017 (the year these numbers reference) deaths from firearm injuries wasn’t on it. There is 15 causes of death from Heart Disease to Pneumonitis and 40,000 deaths by firearm would fall between Septicemia and Hypertension at number 13. After researching, I realized it was because they lumped the suicide by gun in with total suicides which is where it belongs.
So what does that leave us with? Assaults and police shootings. I’m not even going to take out police shootings even though almost all of them are justified. The reason is because the number is in the hundreds, not thousands. It’s on the list though if you would like to see it. And yet we need to defund the police based on another lie. That is a topic for another post.
So here is the final number for this “epidemic”, including the relatively few police shootings. 14,542 deaths from firearm injuries. Too low a figure to make the top 15. Not on this report is the fact that the types of guns targeted by the “Plan”, “assault weapons”, account for less than 4% of those used in a homicide.
Guess what else I found. Including suicide, the total number of deaths involving firearms, 39,773 is dwarfed by a true epidemic of unnatural deaths. 109,813. Just to put things in perspective and question the motive behind the “Plan”, that is the number of drug and alcohol related deaths. From Joe Biden’s own source.
2 replies on “Duckbill Platypus AKA Pro Gun Democrat”
Well said.
I never cease to be amazed at how people obsess on the hardware used in violence and ignore the people doing the violence and the motivations behind it. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” might be a cliché, but clichés survive for a reason.
After the Second World war, the next deadliest war in modern history is probably not the First World War, as you might think, but the Taiping Rebellion in southern China in the 1850s and early ‘60s.
It’s difficult to be certain but at least 20 and up to 30 million people died in The Taiping Rebellion, top end estimates for the First World War are 22 million.
Think about that. A war famous for the industrialisation of slaughter, with machine guns and massive amounts of truly huge and deadly artillery pieces, with early tanks and aircraft too, fought between countries with over 68 million men under arms all told, killed fewer people than a civil war confined to 5 of the Chinese Empire’s 26 mainland provinces. Certainly, the Taiping Rebellion lasted longer, but there was little artillery involved, and what there was was inefficient black powder muzzle loaders, as were the soldiers muskets, those that had them. The military tech wasn’t even as advanced as that used during the US Civil War and most people had to make do with being killed by old fashioned edged weapons, spears, swords and axes etc. It was a very hand crafted, artisan war.
Clearly, lack of sophisticated and powerful weaponry does not lead to less bloodhsed. Where there is a fundemental callous disregard for human life, there will be bloodshed, guns or no guns.